In this talk, Dr. Jon Dron from the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University will ask some fundamental questions about the nature of learning technologies and, in attempting to answer them, reveal some thoughts on how we should go about building and using them. This is a journey into the heart of something seemingly familiar to all distance and online educators but that turns out to be, on closer examination, complex, fuzzy, and unexpectedly strange. On this journey you will encounter some soft things, some hard things, a screwdriver, two cyborgs, three bears and a Big Mac. What binds them together is a way of seeing learning technologies not as something 'other' but as something integral to and inseparable from all education, whatever the distance.